Being a chukar hunter myself, I found this book to be enjoyable. Whether you hunt them or not, the book has a lot of good points. It doesn't tell all, but it does talk about the realities of chukar hunting. If you're looking for a text book, forget it. But if you want to read a book that is factual and fun at the same time, this is a great book.

This is a literate and personal book, and a short one. As a long time chukar hunter, I think that it falls short in a couple of areas, or I would have rated it five stars.

This is not a "how to" book, although it contains a fair amount of information, and tips on gear.

Worth the money, and as I said, the only book (in English) on the subject.

I've hunted chukars with a fever since I was able to carry a shotgun 25 years ago. Buddy Levy writes wonderfully and his passion, respect and understanding for this great game bird and the land they inhabit shines. It is obvious this book is personal and we are fortunate Levy has let us in.

I highly recommend you make the effort to share Levy's love of what it means to hunt chukars....

This is another sumptuously produced book from the National Geographic Society. The text is a little "mickey-mouse" by my standards, but the photos, many from NASA planetary missions are Hubble, are beautifully reproduced and well worth the price of admission.

The book is divided into sections: inner planets, outer planets, and deep space, with text and photos (in that order) for each.
Nicely done and well worth browsing.

The book goes from the sun and the solar system, through galaxies and nebulas, up to the edges of the known universe, giving great and worthy images (and info) in each "station", all printed on a high quality paper, of course. Especially good are the images from the galaxies and nebulas. Those from the near planets I liked a bit less, and I've seen better ones elsewhere...
The text all the way is well written and enjoyable to read. It gives, in addition to the info about each object, some nice (but basic) introduction to astronomy in general - things such as how distance from stars is measured, how light coming from objects is analyzed, astronomy history etc...
However, as it covers the entire universe, it is, as you might think (considering it's size...), pretty basic - both the images and the info. It gives just a small (but good!) taste of everything, not going too deep anywhere.

All in all, it's an excellent book, but I think it'll be worthy to you only if you don't have many other astronomy books, since it's pretty basic.

Although I started out rating this a "4", I changed my mind and gave it a "5", mainly because I found it for half price and also because some of these pictures are so marvelous that it's scary. You've never seen the Eagle or Helix nebulae like this before and some of the pictures within our own solar system give you a good idea of what it must be like if you're out there--scary. Away from Earth and in a desolate zone millions of miles away. Galaxies, star clusters, etc.. are so much more defined than the photographs of these wonders that come from Earth-based observatories. No atmospheric turbulence and also great photos from the greatest scope man has invented. Galileo would marvel at the photographs of Jupiter and its Moons, which he first discovered long ago. He sure didn't see them like this.

I found Mr. Levy's work on shamanic techniqes as it applies to contempoary artists particularly fascinating. His research navigates the theory that mondern artists (visual as well as performance) such as Van Gogh, Kahlo, Dali and others were able to produce the transcendental content of their work through classic shamanic practices. Mr. Levy clearly illustrates the multiplicity of the creative process therein giving reverence and relevance to shamanic techniqes and towards the comprehension and appreciation of modern art. A must read for any art appreciator!

Although the casual reader (that is, a lazy reader looking for easy, New-Agey content) might find Levy's book too rigorous and academic, I felt that he was scrupulous and thorough in making a case for his theory that many contemporary artists use traditional shamanic techniques to achieve the spiritual and metaphysical content in their work. The profiles of individual artists and their specific uses of certain techniques or processes was especially illuminating, and I appreciated the fact that he included seminal figures like Joseph Beuys and performance artists like Karen Finley-- whose radical content sometimes obscures the powerful social critique it carries. Levy was clear in revealing how work by an individual can heal or benefit an audience of viewers or an entire community. The sections in the back of the book wherein he describes specific shamanic techniques in detail for those who want to experiment with them was especially valuable. Contrary to what another reviewer wrote, there was nothing spacey, indulgent or Druidic about this scholarly work!

TECHNICIANS OF ECSTASY: SHAMANISM & THE MODERN ARTIST by Mark Levy

A Review by Lanier Graham, Director, University Art Gallery California State University, Hayward

What is the relationship between shamanic art and Modern art? Until recently, most people in the art world would have answered: "little or none." Specialists have known for a long time that the relationship actually is very important. But the literature has been small, largely because most art historians have not known enough about shamanism to discuss it in critical terms. Levy is an exception, and his book is an excellent introduction to the subject. There are good reasons why his book has received very positive reviews from noted authorities on shamanism. Not only is he an unusually well-informed art historian, he also has studied the shamanic tradition extensively with highly respected teachers.

Levy guides us to the origins of Modernism among the Symbolist poets and painters when Mallarmé was arguing for the shamanic spirit of Orphism, and when Rimbaud and van Gogh were engaged in private, painful "vision quests" in their secular search for the sacred. Few artists regarded tribal art as beautiful until Gauguin, the Fauves, and the Expressionists looked with new eyes. Picasso and the Cubists also were moved by shamanic art, but their interest was primarily formal. Not until the Surrealists did modern artists look for the shamanic psychology behind the forms. By the era of Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s & '50s, a large number of leading artists were starting to compare themselves to shamans. The curtain between worlds was being lifted.

With the development of Postmodernism in the second half of the 20th century, Neo-shamanism spread to the far corners of the contemporary art world. In a series of penetrating profiles, Levy focuses on semi-shamanic techniques used by a variety of visual and performing artists who do not have the arrogance to call themselves "shamans," but have drawn on the wisdom of our tribal ancestors to bring rays of light into a dark world. The artists discussed offer important clues to how art can help us through the poisoning clouds of self-centered rationalism toward a fuller, richer humanity.

The book did cover Clinical Kinesiology and related areas, but not at the depth that I had expected based on the other reviews of the book. The authors presented "real" examples, but failed to follow up with corrective solutions for the "lay person". Most of the solutions were "your muscle tested weak, see a professional for help". I didn't expect the level of detail that is contained in the six Beardall books, but some corrective examples (like in the Touch For Health books) would have been appropriate. Enough said, it was interesting reading.

It contains practical detox recipes and instructions, muscle testing guidelines and easy to read charts. It goes into alternative therapies and yet, thankfully in my case, skips gem therapy.

I found this book to be very insightful and detailed. It is easy enough for laymen as well as the professional. I got a hold of this book after training in Applied Kinesiology (AK). After a long hard look it appears that this book is the only Clinical Kinesiology book in print. All others appear to be out of print. I would enjoy more published work based on the late Alan Beardall, D.C.. Also, I'd like to comment on the great section in the book on sub-clinical Candidiasis.
Truely a great book (especially for the cost).

Working at PARC in research is something a lot of scientists might dream of. Lots of money and time to burn, living in the beautiful hills of Palo Alto. I used to run my bicycle around there in the morning. Mr. Levy had probably fun writing the book, but I did not have fun reading it. Obviously the author read a lot, knows a lot, but does not get to the point. The story gets lost in a mythical view about paper and information. I have to commit, I made it only to one third of the book, then I gave up, but hey, I don't work in research.
An excellent book about Information in the internet age: Die Bibliothek der Zukunft from Dieter E. Zimmer; unfortunately not in English;

...Our complicated relationship with documents--everything from Post-Its to encyclopedias--is the subject of David Levy's "Scrolling Forward."

Levy, a doctoral computer scientist and calligrapher, is well placed to compare the old and new. His book is organized around broad subjects--reading, writing and the like--but each chapter is a meditation, written more on the "this reminds me of that" principle, than according to something more formal. Such an approach can occasionally get out of control, but at its best the book's style effectively juxtaposes printed and electronic documents and calculates the gains and losses of moving information from one medium to the other.

The fact that Levy is interested in this question indicates a growing maturity in our attitudes toward digital materials. A decade ago, the first important works on hypertext and multimedia--George P. Landow's "Hypertext" and Jay David Bolter's "Writing Space"--declared that, thanks to the computer, the author was dead, the reader reigned supreme, the book was doomed and linear thinking was passe.

They were widely praised within academic circles and provoked defenders such as Sven Birkerts to assert the eternal value of the book. The debate that has followed has largely been beside the point, because it misses several things that Levy wisely considers in depth.

First, arguments over "the future of the book" focus on books, particularly high literature. But we live in a world saturated with texts: We might not read Dante every today, but we'll read street signs, scan newspapers, select from restaurant menus, answer e-mail, ignore ads, type URLs. To drive the point home, "Scrolling Forward" begins not with a discussion of encyclopedias or the Bible, but with a deli receipt. Even something so utterly inconsequential turns out to draw upon thousands of years of history and complex social institutions, not to mention a host of technologies.

"Over the centuries a complex network of institutions and practices has grown up to create and maintain meaningful and reliable paper documents," Levy argues. This is as true of receipts as it is of Rilke: "To be a receipt is to be connected to cash registers, sellers, buyers, products, expense reports, the IRS, and so on." It takes a village to make a document.

Levy's receipt was a hybrid, a printed record generated by an electronic system; therein lies a second big point. It turns out that documents have sloshed between electronic and printed form for decades. Checks and airline tickets were computer-printed from the 1950s. Mainframe computer publishing systems were developed in the 1960s and 1970s for newspapers and other high-volume publishers. In the 1980s, word processors allowed writers to create digital texts. In the 1990s, Web browsers gave readers direct access to digital works. This last and most-publicized step was a culmination, not a revolution. Seen in this light, the whole print versus digital debate seems irrelevant.

The fact that the debate over "the future of the book" took off in the last decade suggests that what's at stake isn't just materials but practices and cultural institutions. We pick up cues about the utility and reputability of printed sources from the publisher, the feel of the paper, even from a document's location in a library or bookstore; such cues have yet to be reproduced consistently online, and the social networks that add value to printed works weren't threatened by the computerization of typesetting and printing.

Documents, Levy argues, aren't just information; they're also material things and cultural artifacts. Even digital documents aren't "just" immaterial bits. As Levy notes, "the ones and zeros of our digital representations ... are embedded in a material substrate no less than are calligraphic letter forms on a piece of vellum." This is not to say that an electronic document can't have all the qualities of a printed one. It is to say, however, that those qualities can't be programmed as features in the next upgrade: They have to be created in the social world and in the world of human practices and attitudes. Levy wants us to recognize that books and journals are much more than containers from which content can now be "liberated." They have influenced-- often to the good--the way we read, organize our thoughts and create order in our intellectual worlds.

Scrolling Forward is a very fine survey of the changing relationships between ordinary objects - in this case, documents - and modern digital influences. Writing, etiquette, and reading habits are being questioned and changed by new technologies and practices: this examines documents of all kinds, considering what is likely to change and what is/should be preserved in the Internet Age. A fascinating survey of the future of documents and their meaning.

A principio, parece uma leitura simples e banal. Já li este livro 6 vezes e cada vez vou entendendo mais tudo aquilo que parecia ter sido compreendido nas outras vezes. É um guia para sempre, pois sempre devemos estar nos transformando em pessoas melhores e mais produtivas e nossas metas. Este é o maravilhoso processo de viver.

Estou tendo minhas primeiras experiencias no campo do auto conhecimento,e começando a aceitar que o sucesso depende de mim.Gostei da maneira que a autora escreve e do vocabulario simples .

De leitura fácil e acessível, um ótimo ponto de partida para quem quiser conhecer a si próprio, descobrir seus 'ingredientes' especiais e iniciar sua aventura de desenvolvimento pessoal em direção ao êxito.

There may be some useful knowledge in here, but I was completely turned off by the author's...theories (she doesn't believe germs can cause disease, for example) and ranting against modern veterinary medicine and farming practices.

I am a goat farmer for many years now. I have bought many books on goats, veterinary manuals, and so on, but this book is the first one I turn to for animal ailments. Natural rearing methods produce better and healthier kids than any other method. I bought one doe kid who was so ill with a disease that affected her brain that I was going to put her out of her misery--- it was too late for a vet to do any good. With the herbal treatments in this book, the goat recovered and lived over a year in good health.

I have used this book for years and it has done wonders for my animals. It difinitely saved lives of animals the vet had given up on.The information is specific, with easy to understand instructions for preparation of herbs and what/when/why of their use.

The title should really be _Evolutionary Wars: The Billion Generation Battle.._. The book is a description of various defenses and offenses animals have developed through evolution to aid them in the great natural selection. However, he didn't go into as much detail as I'd hoped for about those specific defenses/offenses, and exactly what species they have possibly made obsolete. It was more of a listing it seemed. Snakes have venom. That is cool. Salamanders can change color. That is cool.

The author mixes dry science with enough pizzazz to evoke the kind of wonder a child has for small insects and other creatures featured in the book. I wouldn't say that I couldn't put this book down. I enjoyed it more by reading bits and pieces at my leisure.

As a kid, I use to love watching insects. The ants impressed me the most, with their organization and ferocity. Sometimes I'd play a game to see how long I could hold my hand on the nest. Caterpillars were another curiosity, with their spines, toxic hairs, and camouflage. And what kid hasn't had the experience of picking up a lizard or snake, only to find it excreting its feces all over the place, to ward off potential predators?

When I saw Levy's book in the bookstore at the University of Washington it caught my attention immediately. Reading it was like going back in time, to the woods behind our house, where my fascination with animals and their modes of attack and self-defense originated. Levy's book is for all the kids (including the ones over 30) who find something intriguing about the microscopic kingdoms hidden under a log, or in a pond, and the ferocious battles that are wage there.

Evolution wouldn't exist without competition. The subtitle in Levy's book elaborates on the content: "A three-billion-year arms race." This is a book about plants and animals, and how they evolved to eat and escape from each other. The ones that are most effective in either evading or executing capture are the ones that propagate their DNA, and the result of this battle of pursuit and escape over the last 2 billion or so years has been some truly amazing life forms, employing some really interesting solutions.

Like any good book, Levy begins at the beginning, describing a little about the competition that existed among the very first forms of life on earth. Throughout the book, Levy describes different dimensions of the conflict. Some dimensions lead to flight, others to eyes, some to incredible speed and agility, others to stealth, and still others to ears of great acuity. Many conflicts resulted in chemical defenses. And some of the most bizarre resulted in camouflage.

A common theme throughout Levy's book is the manner in which evolution, over hundreds of millions of years, has resulted in extraordinarily complicated and refined mechanisms for both defense and attack. The discussion about bats, for example, describes how these small mammals use their acoustic sonar to track flying insects with the sort of accuracy we (who, by comparison, hardly use our ears at all) can scarcely imagine. Reading the section on bats, I had to remind myself that, while they do some incredible things with sound, animals with eyes do equally impressive feats with their eyes. Bats can decipher an incredible amount of information in an unbelievably complex mix of acoustic signals. Animals with eyes, on the other hand, manage to make sense of a bewildering barrage of electromagnetic radiation, and even discern the tiger in the grass. It's just that the difference in the evolutionary paths our ancestors took is so incredible that I cannot imagine doing with my ears what comes naturally to those bats with their ears.

Levy frequently compares the evolutionarily designed characteristics of animals with what we see in modern war machines. The flying bat, for example, hones in on its prey with far greater efficiency and accuracy than any guided missile. The chemical sensors in the noses of many animals are sensitive to an extraordinary degree. Some fish bring down flying insects by spitting water at them. To make the kill, they have to account for relative motion, and parabolic flight of the water drops. Other fish (the Anableps dowi) spend a lot of time near the surface of the water. To search for objects in both the water and the air, they have to account for the difference in the index of refraction in the air, and under water. The solution? They have evolved two eyes: one for seeing above water, and one for seeing below.

Of the many features in this book, some of the best are the many excellent black-and-white line drawings. The book is full of them (they average about every other page). It's also well written, and has a generous index. The subject matter is what captured me, though. If you are someone who finds fascination in the incredible, but possibly little-known facts about animals, especially insects, then I think you will enjoy this book as much as I did. It certainly kept my attention. It's one of those books I had difficulty putting down.

I find Let's Go guides are always great. But after travelling around a country as big as Australia, something more than accurate information is needed. I used the Frommer's Guide from $50 a day as well as this one. I found Frommer's is easier for organizing a trip where you have to be aware of the very long distances. Information is better classified and very professional. It offers a cut above backpacker's information too and excellent advice on diving and other adventures. (And a detail that at least really simplifies my economy is that prices always have the AUD value beside them.) Of course, Let's Go, printed later, has better information on the Sydney 2000 Olympics and a wider variety of hostels.

I used the 1999-Aus book as a guide for my trip to Australia. From the very beginning where it guided me to the cheapest ticket to Sydney, I knew it was a great book. The maps in the book were good and the activities suggested were fantastic. If you are in college or recently out (like me) and you enjoy the outdoors this book is for you. Among my complaints were some of the food establishments suggested: one even made me sick. My other large complaint is that there are plenty of cheap hotels in Aus that aren't reviewed or suggested. Let's go seems to favor hostels above all else. The Final Word: If you need to plan your trip and want suggestions of what to see (anywhere, ANYWHERE in the country) then I whole heartedly suggest this book.

Not knowing anything about Australia, I was hesitant about taking off on my own but after reading the Let's go book, it seemed like I knew the country. When I got there I felt I had an edge, not only did I know places to stay and where to eat, I learned about a number of unspoiled spots to explore. I've seen other books and this one is definately the best!

This book is titled as a "Companion" and it lives up to that name. It is a collection of wide ranging topics related to inventing and marketing an invention. He covers a lot about the patent and copyright processes and then covers how to market your invention with a short chapter on how to get a prototype made.
A large part of the books 400+ pages are forms examples and lists of helpful organizations listed by state. The resource lists are for everything from Inventors Organizations to patent search Internet sites and University Innovation Centers. Going through the list can help with ideas on how to get help solving a problem.
This book is copyrighted in 1995 so at least some of the patent search and application data is out of date. There has been one major change in the patent laws since then, several changes in the fee schedule presented, and large changes in the Internet patent search addresses. I have not read Levy's new "Compete Idiot's Guide...." but I suspect that it is an update of this book.

This book is titled as a "Companion" and it lives up to that name. It is a collection of wide ranging topics related to inventing and marketing an invention. He covers a lot about the patent and copyright processes and then covers how to market your invention with a short chapter on how to get a prototype made.

A large part of the books 400+ pages are forms examples and lists of helpful organizations listed by state. The resource lists are for everything from Inventors Organizations to patent search Internet sites and University Innovation Centers. Going through the list can help with ideas on how to get help solving a problem.

This book is copyrighted in 1995 so at least some of the patent search and application data is out of date. There has been one major change in the patent laws since then, several changes in the fee schedule presented, and large changes in the Internet patent search addresses. I have not read Levy's new "Compete Idiot's Guide...." but I suspect that it is an update of this book.

I liked this book. Has good intructions and resources generally, plus the usual fluff of forms and inventors councils. His product report is worth reading as his other books. Perhaps best from the library, but a good book to buy for reference. For a good way on what to invent, I would choose Mosley's "Marketing your invention" and for processes to avoid failure bringing ot market Robert G. Cooper's "Winning at new products" Levy has had one big winner, the game Adverteasing, but is a good author overall. His advice should be taken into account with other invention books for an overall picture.